While employing vast hordes of woke naïfs to police content and purge “misinformation” (the current term of art among slavers for anything that diverges from their narrative), YouTube (wholly owned by Google) can’t be bothered by identifying, labeling, and shutting down obvious scams which are using their platform to infringe trademarks of legitimate businesses, defame them by association with criminal activity, appropriate content produced by them without permission, and use this to promote transparent scams, committing international wire fraud. This activity has been ongoing for more than a month, and regularly shows up in my “Home” page on YouTube. Here are two posted today. I do not embed these videos to avoid circulating them further, but if you’re interested in seeing what they’re doing, you can manually follow the links below.
These are both purportedly “live” streams which, in fact, replay content from SpaceX public events in a small window at the right, and at the left promote a “double your money” scam in Ethereum and Bitcoin, with a tweet purporting to be from Elon Musk promoting the scheme. The viewer is directed to a site called “x2spacex.com” by a URL and QR code. The name of the YouTube account is “SpaceX [UP]” and uses a copy of the SpaceX logo as its avatar/identification. If you visit the named site, you see a page which appropriates the SpaceX trademark and logo and directs the viewer to the scam page, with a heading “5.000 BTC! Giveaway by Elon Musk. Elon Musk and SpaceX Foundation believe that blockchain will make the world more fair. To speed up the process of cryptocurrency mass adoption, We decided to run 5 000 BTC giveaway.”
The scammer domain is registered by “Regional Network Information Center, JSC dba RU-CENTER” at nic.ru, the Russian top level domain registrar. The domain was registered on 2022-02-15.
This scam pops up on various YouTube accounts, all of which are deliberately named to imply ownership by or association with SpaceX.
Aren’t you glad YouTube is looking out for your best interests as it filters and censors content?
Presumably, that is because YouTube is actively promoting the scams. Such involvement should not be protected by Section 230.
Furthermore, the gratuitous failure to police such frauds highlights that the political deplatforming YouTube does is not done in good faith and is also not protected by 230.
Google, like the mafia, protects paying “customers”. SpaceX is likely one of increasing numbers that are wise not to “subscribe” to Evil Google. God is good.
Months later, the scammers are still at it, and YouTube has done nothing to shut them down. I just searched for “SpaceX”, looking for a livestream of the Starlink launch from Vandenberg tonight, and there were a whole bunch of them running at once, from accounts with names like “SpaceX CEO” and “SpaceX US”, promoting crypto scams, this time from a domain called “SPACEX-MUSK.ORG”, which was registered in Russia on 2022-05-04. The first of these has the following delightful title card, indicating the attention to detail of the scammers.
Be sure not to miss this “FONFERENCE”!
The “SpaceX CEO” account has this banner on its account page:
Here is a YouTube post by the “Tech Ingredients” guy about a YouTube scammer using a channel called “steve vannest” which was created on 2022-05-19, has only 84 subscribers, and has posted just one video. That video (I link rather than embed if you wish to view it), “Portable AC SYSTEM”, posted on 2022-05-21, has as of this writing, 3,697,758 views, growing by hundreds of thousands a day, and is apparently being promoted by comment spam all over YouTube.
The video is assembled from clips from videos posted by Tech Ingredients, and claims to show an “invention” by the creator of that channel, with a voice over in a British accent. What is being promoted is a “swamp cooler” which, of course, is fraudulently claimed to be an air conditioner, which it fraudulently claims is endorsed by Tech Ingredients.
The company responsible for making the product is in—wait for it—China. Their U.S. distributor claims no knowledge of the YouTube scam video. Tech Ingredients then reported the fraudulent appropriation of their content to promote a scam to YouTube.
Crickets.
But accidentally include five seconds of music playing on the radio while you’re recording a video and wham, it’s gone with a “content match” copyright strike.
How low can Google / YouTube go keeping this fraud up ??? Google / Youtube wouldn’t even think of promoting videos with big money from China ??? Yeh right.
Justice. Youtube finally pulled down video (see screenshot below).
Because of damages to reputation (millions of viewers pushed by Google), Tech Ingredients legal and business options going forward are:
Relatedly, when watching a YouTube video on a PC web browser, there is a “Report” function. That “Report” function is omitted from the mobile app.
This seems to be a convenient excuse for then not including a “Report” function for all the fraudulent paid videos YouTube pushes on you when using the mobile app. Evidence of bad faith? Presumably the function could be set up to make it clear whether the user is reporting the paid video or the creator video it is interrupting.
The SpaceX YouTube scammers have come back over the last few days in a fury of activity. I sometimes see three or four near the top of the recommended videos on my home page. Here is one that is running right now (I have blocked the URL from embedding or auto-linking—copy and paste it into an address bar if you want to view it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdO6OXAsSCg
This one identifies the channel as “SpaceX, Inc.”, which has 508 subscribers and was registered with YouTube on (amazingly) 2011-08-14. The “About” page uses the SpaceX logo. The user name for the account is “XxxMillaMus14xxX” which I do not believe Elon Musk has yet named one of his progeny.
Apparently the scammers have been filtered based on including their scam URLs in the video description, so now the description is just text copied and pasted from the genuine SpaceX site and has nothing to do with the “live stream” purported to be shown, which is video of a joint interview of Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey from months ago. The video has a “pinned tweet” supposedly from Elon Musk and QR code. The fraudulent tweet from Elon says “Your life will change within minutes if you scan the QR code. That’s not a joke.”
Then, they have a chat box at the right of the screen which contains the scam pitch.
This contains the scam URL, which I suppose YouTube doesn’t scan for in chat messages. Presumably the scammers didn’t like the mockery a real chat window would attract, so they are the only poster and set the chat window so that only those who have subscribed to the scam channel for 10 years or more can post to it.
The QR code in the video decodes to the URL in the chat box, “teslayoutube.org”. The WHOIS information for this domain is entirely redacted. All we know is that the registrar is something called REG.RU LLC, which has a Russia phone number with a Moscow area code. The domain was registered on 2022-09-24.
These are the Silicon Valley gatekeepers who are going to keep us all safe from “misinformation”.
